Course title: Wealth, Inequity & Islam

Economics, History, and the Systems That Shape Our Lives

 

Course Description

Why are some people wealthy while others remain poor? Where does wealth actually come from? What makes money valuable, and why do societies create debt? When does trade create prosperity, and when does it deepen inequality? Most importantly, why do systems designed to generate wealth so often produce profound inequity?

Wealth, Inequity, and Islam explores these questions by looking beyond the conventional boundaries of economics. Economic life is not simply about prices, markets, or mathematical models. It is deeply shaped by law, politics, culture, morality, religion, institutions, and historical circumstance. In this course, wealth, money, debt, capital, labor, trade, property, and the state are examined not as isolated phenomena, but as interconnected parts of the larger systems through which human societies organize work, exchange resources, create wealth, and distribute power.

For students interested in economics, this course offers something a conventional economics curriculum may not: historical depth, cross-cultural comparison, and a systems-level understanding of how economic life actually operates. The goal is not to replace economic analysis, but to expand it—to understand the larger human systems within which economic behavior takes place.

The course takes students on a journey across time and civilizations. Islam serves as a primary historical and conceptual case study, with particular attention to the ideas, institutions, and practices concerning economic life that developed within Islamic civilization. These are placed in direct conversation with the intellectual traditions that shaped the modern Western world.

You will encounter classical and modern Islamic perspectives alongside major thinkers in European and American intellectual history. We will explore:

Ibn Khaldun, whose 14th-century analysis of work, taxation, markets, state power, and the rise and decline of societies developed a remarkably systematic account of economic and social life centuries before many of these questions became central to modern social and economic thought.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo, whose work helped establish the foundations of modern political economy and shaped enduring debates about markets, labor, production, trade, and distribution.

Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas transformed understandings of capitalism, society, economic behavior, and the role of the state.

We do not treat these thinkers merely as representatives of competing theories. Instead, we ask what they were trying to understand about human societies: how we produce and exchange, why wealth accumulates, why poverty persists, how states exercise economic power, why economic systems change, and what individuals and societies owe one another.

Using a systems-thinking approach, you will learn to connect ideas, institutions, incentives, and historical events across cultures and over time. You will learn to look beneath familiar economic categories and examine the deeper structures—often hidden in plain sight—that give economic life its shape.

What You Will Explore

• • • How different societies define, create, and measure wealth
    • The origins and functions of money, debt, and capital
    • The dynamics of work, labor, property, and economic production
    • How trade and markets can both expand prosperity and deepen inequality
    • The relationship between economic power and political authority
    • How law, morality, religion, and culture shape economic behavior
    • Why economic systems produce both intended and unintended consequences
    • How historical systems of economic life continue to shape contemporary debates over wealth, debt, inequality, finance, markets, and the role of the state.

What You Will Learn: Your Intellectual Toolkit

By the end of this course, you will have a broader and more sophisticated way of thinking about economic life. You will be able to:

• • • See Systems: Analyze the structures, incentives, relationships, and institutions that shape economic behavior, moving beyond isolated metrics to understand the larger system.
    • Think Historically: Trace how ideas and institutions concerning wealth, money, labor, property, debt, markets, and the state developed over time—and how historical systems continue to influence the present.
    • Compare Across Civilizations: Critically evaluate Islamic and Western intellectual traditions concerning economic life and understand how different moral, legal, political, and cultural frameworks have addressed similar human problems.
    • Analyze Power and Ethics: Develop nuanced, evidence-based perspectives on how economic power is created and distributed and on the responsibilities of individuals, communities, markets, and states.

Most importantly, you will gain a way of thinking about economic life that complements conventional economic training—one that allows you to see economic behavior not as an isolated sphere of human activity, but as a deeply human phenomenon shaped by ideas, institutions, power, history, and the ways societies choose to organize themselves.

In short, if you want to go beyond the technical analysis of economics and develop a deeper understanding of how economic life actually works—where wealth comes from, why systems behave as they do, how economic institutions emerge, why inequality persists, and how economics interacts with law, politics, morality, culture, and power—this course offers dimensions of understanding that conventional economic training may leave unexplored.